Ozzie Sport

Alexa ranks websites based on worldwide traffic.  If a site is popular in certain countries, it may also be ranked in those countries.  This data is gathered using toolbars that people on the web download and install. Some Australian tech people doubt the accuracy of the numbers for Australia as the toolbar is not widely installed.  Working on this assumption, most of the people in Australia and New Zealand who use the toolbar are people who are involved with online market, search engine optimization or some other group where website rankings matter. (This could be employees of a particular company installing the toolbar so that when they visit a site, it gets more views and thus the rank goes up.)
Still given the toolbar install limitations, Alexa is included to provide another perspective.   In terms of Australian and New Zealand’s women sport, this perspective is tech friendly people’s interest in women’s sport.  This group could be important to attract to as they are more likely to be involved with social media, social bookmarking and other forms of engagement online.
Assuming that Alexa’s toolbar is installed evenly amongst various groups of sport fans, Alexa’s perspective is best in terms of defining interest relative to other teams.  How popular is say netball compared to women’s swimming or basketball or cricket?  Alexa is also useful for determining when interest in a team peaks, and to find out of if this interest over time mirrors when competitions happen and big news is released.
There is a major limitation for using Alexa to gauge the comparative interest in women’s sport and that involves how women’s sport is organized.  In the case of the W-League, the W-League’s official page forwards to the A-League site.  For all teams but the Canberra United, the team pages are embedded inside the site for the men’s team and it is impossible to differentiate traffic between the two.  While this could be seen as good for women’s sport fandom by trying to get audience share from the men, it also is a bit unfair as those pages often aren’t updated as often and do not share equal space and visibility on a site.  Beyond that, it is just impossible to track interest in women’s sport separately and it makes it harder to justify say sponsorship for a women’s club alone.
The Alexa data is broken down by league in order to give a better perspective regarding the comparative performance of each team in the league.

ANZ Championship

Looking at this table, it clearly shows that when the season is going on, there is increased traffic to the site.  Teams do not maintain their traffic levels during the off season.  This data would have been better had it contained information regarding website rank during the Commonwealth Games to see if there was a bump in interest during that period.

Australian Cycling Federation

This table includes both the Australian Cycling Federation and Rachel Neylan, a female Australian cyclist. Interest in Neylan is nowhere near the level of the federation that she’s part of. Her ranking is very low and suggests that she like gets less than a thousand visits a month. In November, interest in her dropped completely off. This is probably because there are not any major competitions which she has taken part in that have occurred in the past three months.

AWIHL
The AWIHL season is currently going on. Most of the teams have their own websites hosted on their own domains. The possible exception is the Melbourne Ice, who are not included. Ice hockey in Australia is a small sport, with a niche audience for both participants and fans, and few facilities when compared to sports like netball and cricket. Opportunities for women are even small. Given these issues, it is not surprising that the team sites do rank at all in Australia and do not rank internationally.

Netball Australia
The domain here is for the netball federation in Australia. It suffers the same issue as the ANZ Championship data: It doesn’t really measure the impact of the Commonwealth Games in terms of traffic. It does demonstrate overall more interest in the national team than in the premiere women’s competition. This likely suggests that support for the national team does not translate into interest in the league. If that is true, it is a fundamental problem for the game that the federation and league should work on.

Netball New Zealand
The table below represents a the Netball New Zealand federation and a local club side that plays in New Zealand. Neither has a rank in New Zealand. Given that, it could be surmised that comparatively speaking, netball is less popular population wise in New Zealand than in Australia. How accurate this is could be debatable as the NRL team for New Zealand often fails to rank inside New Zealand. Alexa may just not be as good in New Zealand as it is in Australia. That said, it looks like Netball New Zealand is more popular now than when the ANZ Championship was going on. This could possibly be a residual effect from the Commonwealth Games, where the Kiwis took gold.

Swimming Australia
Stephanie Rice’s site represents female interest in swimming. Stephanie is active on social networks like Twitter. In September 2010, she was involved in a major controversy for her use of the word faggot on Twitter. In October 2010, she attended a major Australian Rugby Union event. For better or worse, these two events really raised her profile. Data for Swimming Australia is provided in order to give context to Stephanie’s numbers.

Tennis Australia
Tennis Australia is represented here by Sam Stosur. The number of dates information was collected is extremely limited but it suggests that interest peaked during the northern summer, when interest in tennis is at its highest.

W-League
Measuring interest in the W-League using Alexa is difficult. The W-League domain redirects to the A-League page and only the Canberra United have an official site located on their own domain. Contrary to expectations, the start of the W-League season did not result in increased traffic to the United site.

WNCL
The WNCL is the premiere cricket competition for state teams in Australia. Data has only been found for the Victorian Spirit. As the cricket season has gotten underway, the team has seen their traffic increase. Inside Australia, it does not appear to have become a top 100,000 site. Given that cricket is one of the more popular women sports, that they don’t rank higher, is a bit surprising.

Related Posts:

• Most popular sport league/team websites in Australia
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

43 things is a goal setting community found at www.43things.com/.  Compared to professional sports for men, the women related goals are less likely to exist and less likely to involve a component that expresses fandom such as a desire to buy a shirt or attend a championship match.  This presents two issues.  First, the number of goals related to women’s sport is less than men’s: There is clearly a gap in interest levels between men and men’s sport that needs to be addressed.  Beyond that, it highlights the idea that women’s sport does not have the built in spectatorship that men’s sport has and people do not identify as clearly as fans of these teams.

The table below begins to give an idea as to the amount of interest in randomly selected women’s clubs, leagues and athletes on 43things over time.  As you can see, there isn’t. For comparisons sake, the Fremantle Dockers have 5 goals, the Collingwood Magpies have 6, Hawthorn Hawks have 4 and the Melbourne Storm have 2.

It appears, based on the audience using the site, that growing the women’s sport related goals in an organic manner, done with out deliberation on the part of various stakeholders, appears unlikely.  There is barely an audience for men and the Australian population using the site is much smaller than on other networks.

Related Posts:

• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

This is an updated version of from November 13 , November 16 and November 18.

If there is anyone missing, please let me know. I’m always happy to improve this list. I feel like there are probably more roller derby accounts out there that I’m missing. I also feel like there should be more Kiwi women on the list that I’m just not seeing. If anyone knows a good place to begin to find either group, please comment.

If anyone wants the list of followers for these accounts and all the public information that you basically see in the list below, please let me know and I will be happy to send you a csv file containing that information. I’m just hesitant to upload it as I only have so much bandwidth and I have about 805 files with follower information.

The biggest movers on this list appear to be ItsStephRice, RochelleGilmore, Sally_Fitz, gypsy_gilmore, libby_trickett who have all gained 50+ followers. This contrasts with kristy_giteau, MelissaBreen_, muirsop, TheFlyingBats, saltydolls, samikennedy, SportingSheilas, watsonjessica who all lost between 1 and 3 followers, which if you think about it isn’t that many followers.

Related Posts:

• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

Yeah, it is that time again! I’ve added about 10 new accounts to this list. They were mostly journalists, people I saw referenced on my Twitter feeds or people that were mentioned in the comments of my previous post. There are a few that where the accounts to have been deleted or otherwise just did not get counted and those are just left off this list rather than be signified with a 0. This is an updated version of Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (version 2), October 4 and October 11, November 11, November 16 and November 18. If I’m missing anyone or anything, let me know.

For probably 99% of these, I have a list of all the person’s followers. If you want to see that information, please let me know and I will be happy to send you the csv with that information.